Harvesting stem cells from the body is an arduous task, in part because so few of the cells exist in people.
The company has assembled a dream team of researchers in adult stem cells from Harvard, Stanford, the Scripps Institute and the University of Washington to pool their intellectual property and their ideas on making adult stem cells regenerate deteriorated body parts.
The technique used by Green and Hollister is part of a burgeoning field called regenerative medicine, which involves engineering therapies -- using things like stem cells, or "body parts" constructed out of biological material -- to harness the body's ability to heal itself.
When transplanted into Hannah, the stem cells automatically picked up the body's signals and got transformed into epithelial cells, the kind found in any trachea.
But the venture capitalists at ARCH liked Moon's idea of using old-fashioned pharmaceuticals to manipulate the stem cells that were already in the body.
"This is a stem cell that is generated by the body's own tissue so the immune system does not recognise it and they can get any place they want without being attacked, " said Prof Rambukkana.
Existing biotechs focusing on stem cells aim to implant cells into the body.
Embryonic stem cells are the master cells of the human body.
Induced pluripotent stem cells can come from any cell in the human body, including skin cells, so they don't have the moral quandaries surrounding them.
So some biotechnology companies are taking stem cells from other, more accessible parts of the body, and are pushing ahead with them in clinical trials.
Someone has to donate "stem cells, " the basic building blocks from which new body parts are grown.
Stem cells derived from umbilical cords are less versatile than embryonic stem cells, which could conceivably replace any cell in the body.
Another hurdle will be to design drugs that hit bad stem cells without also killing good ones in other parts of the body.
Exactly what happens to the windpipe after it is transplanted isn't clear, but researchers believe that placing stem cells, which are capable of developing into different types of body cells, can pick up signals from their environment and integrate with existing tissues.
First came the remarkable work of Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, who showed it was possible, by activating just four genes, to take a mature cell (he used a bit of skin but other cells would work) and turn it into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell with the potential to become any other cell in the body of mouse or human.
It is hoped that work of this kind will eventually enable scientists to turn mature cells back into stem cells which have the ability to become any type tissue in the body.
On Monday, the 2012 prize for medicine or physiology was awarded to John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan for changing adult cells into stem cells, which can become any other type of cell in the body.
Inside the body, and out, there is no shortage of jobs for stem cells.
There is real hope that stem cells will soon be available to regenerate tissue for any part of the body.
Its technique involves extracting a patient's own bone-marrow cells, isolating certain stem cells, and delivering the gene therapy before returning the cells to the body.
Dalton is a leader in uncovering exactly what it is about embryonic stem cells that allows them to turn into any kind of tissue in the body.
The stem cells were taken from these and, in a laboratory culture, and body chemicals used to "persuade" them to shift, stage by stage, from this state into the type of brain cells that their Parkinsonism mice were lacking.
They took a sample of human skin cells and converted it into stem cells, which are capable of becoming any other type of cell in the body.
He was part of a team investigating the use of stem cells, which are able to become any other type of cell in the body from nerve to bone, taken from the amniotic fluid which surrounds a developing foetus in the womb.
Researchers highly value embryonic stem cells because of their potential to turn into any organ or tissue cell in the body.
Embryonic stem cells are "blank" or undifferentiated cells that can develop into any type of cell in the body.
They used stem cells from a human embryo, which are capable of becoming any other type of cell in the human body from nerve to skin, muscle to kidney.
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